Alabama up close

The filmmaker spent five years with Greensboro residents, including Quincy Bryant.

“Black people are not in control of images of ourselves,” says filmmaker RaMell Ross of his experimental documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening. “We’ve never been in control of images of ourselves.”

A typical documentary about Greensboro, Alabama, might focus on the economic hardships and lack of employment opportunities outside of the local catfish plant. Instead, Ross’ film focuses on the vibrant details of life as it is lived in the African American community.

Ross concluded in a Village Voice interview that such a matter-of-fact approach “is actually radical — because what you’re looking at is actually, like, just an up-close image of a black person. That’s all it is.”

He initially visited Hale County to teach a two-week photography course. He eventually spent five years filming everyday moments in the community, focusing on the lives of two young men, Quincy Bryant and Daniel Collins. While the film does follow some broad trajectories in the town and in the lives of the participants — birth, love, loss, death — those looking for narrative arcs or conventional documentary rhetoric are looking in the wrong place.

Individual shots strike with the clarity and force of an imagist poem. It’s best to engage with the images as images, because the real magic happens within the shots. Ross’ filmmaking style emphasizes moment-to-moment effects, which means you have to pay attention to the details.

For example, in one shot, a toddler runs back and forth in a living room, as toddlers tend to do. The shot plays out longer than you need to understand “the point,” but the duration itself becomes the point, showing the toddler’s inexhaustible energy and commitment. The next scene is in a basketball team’s locker room, as young men engage in rough-housing horseplay, killing time before going back on the court. Again, the shot plays longer than necessary, but their restless energy starts to resonate with the toddler’s. The juxtaposition is not a broad statement — it is simply two well-observed moments that create a memorable couplet.

Many individual shots are breathtaking. A deer stands frozen in the headlights of a car, its breath visible on a cold night. An airplane begins an air-show stunt dive, and as the camera tilts down to follow its progress, the shot evolves into a close-up of a child in attendance. These nearly abstract, perfect moments can only come from hours of dedicated shooting.

By alternating between aesthetically stunning shots and emotionally resonant moments, Ross produces a richly emotional experience. And by not using the people in the film to make a specific socio-economic statement, Ross disrupts what we expect from documentary images of African Americans. He exerts precise formal control over shot composition and editing, but allows the people and their images to speak for themselves.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening concludes this year’s Spotlight Cinema series at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. The screening is on Dec. 5, 7 p.m.